the first thing I did after seeing this notebook at Pax was fire an email over
to Gigabyte asking for them to send me one it is no great secret how much I
love the Razer Blade 14 and small powerful gaming machines in general and
I was floored by how much Hardware Gigabyte packed into the new aorus X3
but after my experience with the bricks gaming and its impressive looking specs
that were spoiled by thermal throttling I told myself not to get too excited
until I'd actually seen it perform so here we go welcome to my
review of the a X3 from
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the first hint that this device has some serious horsepower under the hood is the
included massive 180 W power brick I
wish they'd include something a little bit more elegant like what Razer does
but while you will have to carry it it's not the thing you'll actually be
spending your time interacting with so let's move on to the good stuff the
exterior of the X3 is as beautiful as the first notebook Gigabyte released
under the aorus brand the X7 on the top
cover we find their bird of prey logo on an otherwise just plain sexy matte black
anodized aluminum finish then on the bottom we find two as expected somewhat
tiny stereo speakers that for as empty as they sound at least go reasonably
loud without Distortion rubber feet to keep the device in place lots of vents
to hopefully keep things cool and torque
screws that can be opened up to reveal the actually stunningly upgradable
interior for a gaming rig that while not as thin as the Razer Blade 14 is
actually lighter at only 1.8 kg to
complement the core i7 4710hq quad core you get 8 gigs of DDR3 with two slots
total for a maximum of 16 gigs of RAM you get a GTX 870m with an Overkill 6
gigs of GDDR 5V RAM and two m.2 slots
each supporting up to 512 gig ssds and
capable of being configured in raid Gigabyte keeps this up and they may just
make the X3 my next laptop back to the outside we'll start at the left where we
find a Kensington lock a mini DisplayPort port with support for 4K HDMI a
usb2 port headphone and microphone jacks and an air intake on the front are
indicator LEDs for Bluetooth wireless drive activity low battery and power and
then on the right there's more ventilation and SD card reader two USB 3
ports and the power button finally moving around to the back we are greeted
by power in two very large cooling vents
jam-packed full of heat sink fins to leverage as much of the total thickness
of the notebook as possible and what's this A Hardline landport now we're
talking I mean sure it's a killer landport rather than an Intel based one
but damn it it's an RJ45 connector so I'm going to give big kudos to Gigabyte
for including this when the x3's thin and light competitors rely solely on
Wireless in fact I think the io on this notebook is the best balanced I've ever
seen from a gamer's perspective I mean how many gamers use four four pole
single Jack headsets razor Gigabyte includes dedicated headphone and mic
Jacks also why do all Ultra books
considers SD card slots optional this is super handy and then finally I
personally like having a single usb2 port these days they offer better
compatibility especially outside of the OS and it's not like devices like mice
are going to be bottlenecked by USB 2 anyway so gold star Gigabyte for the io
now let's crack this baby open there's that screen I can't believe
I made it this far and failed to mention the 13.9 in display on this notebook is
a 3K one yeah 3200 by 18800 60 HZ matte
finish exop panel boom it delivers
stunning contrast acceptable enough backlight bleed that Gigabyte had the
coonies to ship the notebook with a black desktop background by default and
viewing angles that are strongly reminiscent of the Razer Blade 14 so not
as good as IPS but a heck of a lot better than TN and with very good motion
blur characteristics to boot one thing that's missing though and it's the first
thing to really give me pause about this notebook so far is touch some people
won't care and good for them but this is lonus Tech tips and you can tell me how
touch is stupid when you've got your own YouTube channel with Blackjack and
hookers I've gotten used to touch and particularly on Windows 8 going back to
not having it is quite an adjustment for me I also didn't find the robustness of
the hinge mechanism particularly a inspiring but this has become a common
complaint of late with screens getting so thin and on that somewhat complaining
note let's head into the mixed bag that is the keyboard and touchpad the
keyboard's white backlight is strong or less strong or off if you prefer and the
layout is mostly pretty good with long
shifts Backspaces Etc five programmable G keys with five cyclable profiles and
support for text input Mouse input and macros and only the gimpy for no
apparent reason arrow keys for me to really complain about but typing on it
didn't feel good in spite of the pretty nice slightly slick feel to the top of
the key caps the keys have a fairly decent travel distance but they're just
kind of mushy without satisfying tactile feedback and they didn't sound good you
know like they sound kind of rattly
which leads us to the trackpad not rattly great build quality tracks like a
dream as long as my hands are dry and
oil free completely if either of those two conditions are not met the glossy
surface turns into a smear greasy mess very quickly I would have preferred if
Gigabyte had gone with a frosted glass rather than a glossy one but lonus you
might say I won't spend all my time typing on this thing and I'm going to
plug in a mouse or a control to play my games anyway so how well does it play
games great question and the answer is
very well at 1080P or usually 1 1600 by
900 for an even divider I didn't have the display scaling issues that I
observed on the Lenovo y50 and I was able to crank up details far more than I
expected so with that resolution out of
the way and doing a great job I decided for the lws to take some Modern games
and dial them into what I felt were playable settings at the native
resolution of 3200x 18800 and was amazed
to discover that apart from not thermal throttling I maxed out around 85° on the
GPU and a little over 90 on the CPU and Tomb Raider I was able to achieve 45 to
55 is FPS across the board without
cranking everything down to low and while maintaining reasonable
temperatures on the outside of the laptop itself too of particular note is
that Gigabyte avoided putting heat generating components directly under the
gaming Zone on the keyboard so sweaty Palm syndrome was a nonissue with this
notebook it should be noted however that it did this by cranking up the fans
fairly aggressively this is not a quiet gaming notebook and it has a
fairly high-pitched whine to the fan noise my last comment on gaming per
performance is regarding battery life as we've come to expect even with battery
boost frame tank as soon as you pull the plug but the X3 at least managed a
fairly acceptable battery life and my sort of stare at the fire in crisis one
test so while it's not revolutionary it at least holds its own against other
similar sized notebooks although I'd like to see someone cram this kind of
power into a smaller area within a larger notebook strap a huge battery to
it and see what we end up with there all
right so up until now I've focused really only on gaming but what about
daily use well that's where things get a little bit hairy again I have very mixed
feelings about 4K even on desktop siiz displays due to poor scaling in Windows
that causes me to have to choose between either impossibly small UI elements or
blurry text and applications that don't scale properly and this is still very
much a problem the reality is though that unless 3K and 4K Hardware starts
showing up these issues won't get addressed so I'm glad someone is taking
the first step and I'm sure folks who invest in an X3 will be patting
themselves on the back when all these issues are behind us and they're
enjoying their super crisp looking display but it is something that they're
going to have to deal with for now speaking of dealing with for now
shopping at the local grocery store for
your razors something that you shouldn't
have to do fighting with someone to undo the lock and key and bring it out for
you and then you go to the counter and pay for it why do you have to deal with all that crap Dollar Shave Club is the
much faster much easier and less expensive way to shop for razors monthly
basically all you do is sign up for the club and they will ship you your razors
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also have other high quality bathroom supplies including their one wipe
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like other people's used hair on them which is why you shouldn't share razors
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you can also get their Dr Carver shave butter which goes on clear so you can
see what you're doing and I think that's pretty much all I have to say about that
thanks Dollar Shave Club for supporting lonus Tech tips and for that matter
small content producers like us everywhere it's great to see companies
that care about supporting smaller guys as opposed to blowing all their money on
developing razors with you know vibrating handles yes thank you Dollar
Shave Club because Without You small
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middle anyway the point is Dollar Shave
Club go to dollarshaveclub.com lus to start shaving time and shaving money and
to Support lonus Tech tips so we can have more SD cards that
we don't use guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike
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